JULY 19, 2006

The new Super Aguri SA06 runs

The new Super Aguri SA06 made its first appearance on Wednesday at Silverstone with Takuma Sato doing the first shakedown tests of the new car. This will be raced for the first time at the German Grand Prix by Sato and his new team mate Sakon Yamamoto, who will join the team in place of France's Franck Montagny. The dramatic-looking new car features a heavily revised monocoque, completely new aerodynamics and a new red and white colour scheme.

The team has struggled this year after plans to use the old BAR 007 had to be shelved over the winter because the team was not in a position to comply with the Concorde Agreement provisions regarding chassis. The decision was thus taken to build a car around the old Arrows A23 chassis and as a result the team has not achieved much, not helped by the fact that Yuji Ide was ejected from F1 after four races when it was decided that he should not be given a full superlicence having raced up to that point on probation. The team put Montagny into the car because no other Japanese driver was available but Yamamoto has served as the test driver in recent races and is now considered to be worthy of a race drive.

All this is bad news for Midland as, in theory, the new Super Aguri should be an improvement.